Unceasing War on Poverty: Beatrice and Sidney Webb and their World

Michael Ward’s Unceasing War on Poverty is the first comprehensive biography of both the Webbs for forty years. It draws extensively on Beatrice’s diaries and on a wide range of other material. Beatrice Potter and Sidney Webb came from opposite ends of the Victorian middle class. Beatrice was one of the nine daughters of Richard … Continued

In Search of Britain’s Postal Paths

Social history can slip through the cracks of the floorboards and, if we are not careful, be easily lost. Such, I fear, is the case  with the lives and times of the rural posties who were phased out by Royal Mail in the late 1960s and early 1970s without any fanfare or proper thank you … Continued

Alcohol, psychiatry and society: Comparative and transnational perspectives, c. 1700-1990s

Waltraud Ernst, Oxford Brookes University wernst@brookes.ac.uk Thomas Müller, Ulm University th.mueller@zfp-zentrum.de This new book addresses one of the central debates in the history of alcohol and intoxication: the supposed ‘medicalisation’ of alcohol use from the nineteenth century onwards. The editors argue that many cultures understood the link between overconsumption of intoxicating beverages and the deterioration … Continued

The Social World of the School

Hester Barron, University of Sussex H.Barron@sussex.ac.uk Most of the writing for my new monograph, The Social World of the School: Education and Community in Interwar London, was done during the pandemic. The lockdowns were a strange time to be writing anything, but to be completing a book which reflected on the purpose of school felt … Continued

Freedom Seekers: Escaping from Slavery in Restoration London

Simon P. Newman, University of Glasgow and University of Wisconsin Jack was one of more than two hundred enslaved people who escaped from their enslavers in London during the second half of the century. There were no doubt many more, but we know about these few because of advertisements like these that appeared in London’s … Continued

Communities of Print

Dr Rosamund Oates & Dr Jessica Purdy, Manchester Metropolitan University r.oates@mmu.ac.uk j.purdy@mmu.ac.uk In 2018, the Communities of Print research network hosted a conference in conjunction with Chetham’s Library, Manchester. The conference sought to bring together a range of researchers from PhD candidates to ECRs to established academics who all shared an interest in the history … Continued

What Dogs have to do with Medieval Public Health

Dr Janna Coomans, University of Amsterdam j.coomans@uva.nl Although the idea of the late medieval city as the apex of disease, chaos and dirt still looms in textbooks and popular culture, a range of recent publications have made efforts to ‘clean up’ the Middle Ages. This was not an era from which things gradually improved in … Continued

Contact Zones of the First World War

Anna Maguire, Queen Mary, University of London a.maguire@qmul.ac.uk @AnnaMaguire24 In his oral history, A Chief is a Chief by the People (1975), Stimela Jason Jingoes, who served with the South African Native Labour Corps, recalled arriving in Liverpool in 1917. When we boarded the train, before we left Liverpool, the girls of that place arrived … Continued